February 26, 2003
U.S. Plan for Saddam: Shock and Awe
Philadelphia Daily News

It starts on a pitch-black, moonless night - quite possibly in two weeks or less - over the sands of the Iraqi desert. By the end of 48 hours, as many as 800 Tomahawk cruise missiles will have fallen on Baghdad - more than during the entire 1991 Gulf War.

By WILLIAM BUNCH
bunchw@phillynews.com

It starts on a pitch-black, moonless night - quite possibly in two weeks or less - over the sands of the Iraqi desert.

Suddenly, Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from warships in the Persian Gulf pierce the cool Arabian night, joined in a matter of minutes by precision satellite-guided bombs fired by B-2 Stealth bombers at high altitude.

In the pre-dawn darkness, Baghdad reels from one bomb blast, then another - one just about every four minutes. As the sun rises, the missile assault continues at the same brutal pace, wiping out not only military units but also power plants and water supplies.

By the end of 48 hours, as many as 800 Tomahawks will have fallen on Baghdad - more than during the entire 1991 Gulf War. At the same time, Stealth bombers will strike as many as 3,000 military targets across Iraq.

The Pentagon calls the proposed pyrotechnic display "Shock and Awe" - a new kind of psychological warfare technique aimed at forcing a confused and shellshocked Iraqi military to collapse within two days, thus achieving quick victory.

But a growing chorus of antiwar critics calls the new strategy a blueprint for killing thousands of civilians in Baghdad. They were particularly alarmed when the military strategist who came up with "Shock and Awe" compared it last month to the 1945 nuclear attack on Hiroshima.

Even some former military men are dubious about "Shock and Awe."

"One very probable response is to trigger the nationalistic impulse to defend the motherland," said Wayne Lee, a University of Louisville history professor who served in the Army in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But Lee said "air-power theorists and 'alternative thinkers' believe this is the wave of the future."

CBS News reported late last month that the current Pentagon war plans call for a "Shock and Awe" bombardment of Baghdad if and when a war in Iraq begins. If the report is true, the likely war in Iraq could mark a turning point in modern warfare. It would be the most intense non-nuclear bombing campaign ever - potentially making the aerial assault depicted in Picasso's "Guernica" look like a Monet watercolor.

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Dan Hetlage, said that the "Shock and Awe" strategy was "definitely under consideration." He stressed that the reason America has invested so much in precise "smart bombs" is to be able to hit military targets without collateral damage to civilians.

"We take more pains than anybody to minimize civilian casualties and collateral damage," Hetlage said. "Our beef is not with the Iraqi people."

In fact, the Air Force is using a new computer program called Bugsplat, which is solely intended to reduce civilian casualties during bombing runs by estimating the size of a blast and what buildings are nearby.

Defense Secretaty Donald Rumsfeld was an early proponent of "Shock and Awe," even before he joined the Bush administration. In 1999, he suggested that the U.S.-led bombing campaign in the Kosovo crisis should have started with a large-scale display of firepower.

"There is always a risk in gradualism," Rumsfeld told CNN in 1999. "It pacifies the hesitant and the tentative. What it doesn't do is shock, and awe, and alter the calculations of the people you're dealing with."

"Don is very familiar with it - it makes a lot of sense," said Harlan Ullman, a former Navy pilot in Vietnam who commanded a destroyer in the first Gulf War and then became the key architect of "Shock and Awe."

Ullman was based at the National Defense University in 1996 when he co-authored "Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance" with James P. Wade and L.A. Edney. The book was widely read by American defense strategists.

Ullman, interviewed by phone from his home in Washington, D.C., said the concept had been inspired by sources as diverse as the 1990s war in Yugoslavia and the work of Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, who wrote "The Art of War" in 5th-century B.C.

Currently a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Ullman also calls the strategy "rapid dominance." He said intense, early bombardment by the world's lone post-Cold War superpower would show the enemy "that we were omnipotent, that resistance is futile."

Several ideas came together in the creation of the "Shock and Awe" strategy. The American military experience in the 1990s showed that the public would support warfare only with as few U.S. casualties as possible. At the same time, the rise of highly accurate, satellite-guided missiles and bombings made it possible for the first time to strike hundreds of targets in a short period.

Ullman believes that civilian casualties in Iraq could be kept to a minimum because the targets would be mainly "command-and-control" centers for the Iraqi military. Ullman believes rank-and-file soldiers, isolated from their leaders, will surrender quickly, saving lives on both sides.

The Pentagon may also drop newfangled bombs that send out an electromagnetic pulse, knocking out computers and electric grids. "We want to affect the enemy's will and perception," he said.

But Ullman also rattled some people when he told CBS News in January, "You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes."

He defended those comments in the phone interview. He said that America's use of nuclear bombs caused the Japanese "to go from suicidal resistance to benign surrender" - ultimately sparring more lives than the tens of thousands that were lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ullman insisted that peace groups who've been protesting "Shock and Awe" are missing the point - that speedy surrender would reduce overall casualties and collateral damage.

But antiwar groups are still more shocked than awed by the strategy.

The much-ballyhooed cancellation of a White House poetry reading with Laura Bush earlier this month came about when an invitee, Sam Hamill, said, "Only the day before I had read a lengthy report on George Bush's proposed 'Shock and Awe' attack on Iraq, calling for saturation bombing that would be like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo, killing countless innocent civilians." The event was scrapped because Hamill and others planned to read anti-war poetry.

"The moral implications are horrifying," said Ira Chernus, a religious-studies professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder and a former Temple University grad student. "It's amazing how little talk you hear in the mainstream debate about the number of people who would be killed."

Chernus, who authored a recent op-ed piece denouncing "Shock and Awe," said his biggest frustration was that few Americans know about the proposed strategy. He noted that a recent Zogby poll found 54 percent of Americans opposing the war if there would be Iraqi civilian casualties.

He said the two-day bombing campaign not only would cause massive destruction, but also would likely eliminate sources of power and clean drinking water.

"What do they think - that nobody's going to die?" he said. "I don't get it."

Estimates of civilian deaths in the 1991 Gulf War are still controversial. A Commerce Department staffer estimated in 1992 that 13,000 civilians had been killed in bombings and as many as 70,000 others in the ensuing public-health crisis. She was rebuked by her higher-ups.

The Pentagon is not making any estimates of how many civilians might be killed in any upcoming warfare in Iraq.

Lee, the Louisville history professor, said another problem with massive bombing campaigns in urban areas is that they don't work. Most history buffs know the air battle over London in 1940 was a turning point for Winston Churchill and Britain in World War II, but experts say Germans also rallied behind Adolf Hitler when Allied bombing increased.

"The potential side effect is that you take a civilian population that may or may not be behind Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the war - and you put them behind him," Lee said.

Indeed, there is still the possibility that "Shock and Awe" could not be part of the final Pentagon battle plan. There was a report last week in the Washington Times that Gen. Tommy Franks, the chief of the central command, is pushing for a limited target list that would spare bridges and phone communications. The idea would be not only to limit civilian deaths but also to lower the cost to America of rebuilding Baghdad when the war is over.

In other words, it could take years to undo 48 hours of "Shock and Awe."

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